CASE STUDY
W
What does your role entail and what
are the company’s core objectives? How do you succeed in maintaining
an efficient infrastructure?
As Head of Infrastructure, I look after pretty
much everything that goes up to the point
where the user can log in, that includes
Internet, networking, storage, compute and
virtualisation. The company aims to provide
analytical services to the mining industry. Can you describe the company’s
infrastructure and how it works? A lot of hard work! We’ve got a really
good team and what we’ve been doing in
the last two years since I joined is going
through a real modernisation of the
infrastructure and maintaining it efficiently
or effectively is basically down to our data
fabric because you have to have your data
where you need it otherwise there’s no
point in having it.
We are very centralised in Liverpool. We
operate in roughly 30 countries and we
provide almost all of our infrastructure over
Citrix and everything is hosted on NetApp. So, by putting the best of breed technology
in place, we’re able to put everything
together and maintain it, so it’s about
choosing your partners.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
How do you ensure that data
centre operations run smoothly
and how is the NetApp solution
helping with this?
NetApp is allowing us to have this flexibility
so we make use of NetApp and of Veeam,
it’s a great partnership. It allows us to
failover, failback and if we did have any
issues we go onto our secondary storage
– a bit slower, but we’re not seeing any
downtime in that respect.
NetApp specifically is rock solid and there’s
always innovation on tap which is really
helping us to become more efficient. So, for
example, with every ONTAP release we’re
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